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Can AI Make Recruitment Fairer?

Recently I looked at a fascinating study that explored whether AI could do a better job of recruiting directors than the CEO themselves. The researchers identified a number of biases that prevent bosses from recruiting effectively, and the AI technology aimed to overcome them.

Suffice to say, the project isn’t yet able to directly ensure that boards are more diverse than they currently are, but hopefully it will at least shed some light on the lack of diversity in boards today, and therefore encourage companies to do a better job.

They do however point to a possible future whereby algorithms become more sophisticated and capable of doing a fairer and more effective job at recruiting than humans can. This could be especially so if given access to private data rather than relying purely on publicly available data to train on.

AI and recruitment

One company that is aiming to bring such approaches to market is recruitment startup HiringSolved. Their RAI 2018 platform is a voice-recognition powered intelligent assistant for recruiters. It aims to provide a user-friendly talent-sourcing interface to hone in on the best candidates.

RAI is built upon the TalentFeed search engine that is at the core of HiringSolved’s offering. It processes millions of data points on job candidates, and aims to allow recruiters to apply data-science to the art of recruitment, and therefore overcome some of the biases that hamper the profession.

“We’re living in an era where anyone who uses a smartphone understands and interacts with voice recognition every day,” the company say. “Yet, despite this universal use in the consumer technology sphere, enterprise technology is still highly complicated, to the point where it can take upwards of 40 hours just to train someone to be proficient in a solution, and then require 100-plus hours to master it. Contrary to the ‘robots are taking over the world’ movement, we’re offering a user-friendly solution that increases human productivity, improves workflow, and most importantly, provides answers – not taking jobs away from them.”

In the short/medium-term, this is probably going to be the application of AI in numerous fields. It’s not revolutionizing recruitment in any way, shape or form, but it is potentially taking some fairly routine tasks and making them more efficient.

If you’re of the opinion that recruitment is a fundamentally broken process, then this limited impact will undoubtedly be something of a let down, but hopefully it’s an acorn that can grow into something more meaningful in time.